Monday, August 15, 2011

Apple MacBook Airs and Intel UltraBooks cometh – Time for a Common Standard on Power Adaptors

Little drops of water,

Little grains of sand,

Makes the mighty ocean

And the pleasant land.

Julia F. Carney, Little Things

Wednesday July 20th 2011AD was a memorable day for everyone who is a fan of anything Apple. This as a new Apple MacBook Air, which had originally made their debut in 2008AD and were upgraded, coincidentally on Wednesday 20th October 2010AD as stated in my Geezam Blog article entitled “MacBook Air and FLASH-based Harddrives - The Quest for Instant On”, also got their day in the Sun. As this is stale news, it is great for a post-mortem on my blog!

In addition to this, Apple has made the Apple Mac OS 10.7 aka Lion available for download on Apple iTunes, very clever, as by virtue of an online purchase, it verifies the identity of the download and makes copying Apple Mac OS 10.7 aka Lion pointless.

This as the owner’s Credit Card Info is captured at the time of purchase in the Apple App store, thus making the download traceable and Apple MacBooks running illegal versions of Apple Mac OS 10.7 aka Lion easy to disable. Worse, each MacBook has its own unique UDID (Unique Data Item Description), data which is also compared at the time of purchase on Apple iTunes, so theft of Apple software is next to impossible.

But alas, there is sad news for the cheapskates still holding on the Apple MacBook. This as Apple has decided to kill off the older Generation Apple MacBook with the plastic cases, roughly about two (2) generations ago in 2009AD.

Quite expectedly too, the Refurbished market for older Apple products, particularly the new (read unused and unsold) and refurbished 2010 Apple Macbooks, are also getting a new lease on life, now selling for sub-US$900 in your local Best Buy (Luck devils, those Americans!) as stated in the article “New 2010 MacBook Air dips below $900, refurb $749”, published Wednesday July 20th 2011AD, CNET News.

Now that the new Apple standard for Laptops is now clearly the Apple MacBook Air, they shall surely be taking the PC Industry for lunch, as prognosticated by Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore in the article “Analyst: Apple MacBook to make gains on PC”, published AUGUST 8, 2011 5:22 PM PDT By Brooke Crothers, CNET News - Nanotech - The Circuits Blog.

Deutsche Bank analyst Chris Whitmore words make a better spiel, quote: “Our recent checks with the PC supply chain suggest overall orders have softened modestly in the past several weeks due to weaker European and U.S. Consumer NB (notebook) demand and more conservative back-to-school expectations from OEMs”.

This as the new designs for Intel’s UltraBook specification mimic the Apple MacBook Air so logically (overuse of the word is deliberate in this article) the power requirements are on par with the Power Adaptor for the Apple MacBook Air. Instead of laptop makers having to make their own power Ports and Power Adaptors, this duty can be given over to Third Party companies to make and retailed separately at any Best Buy or Wal-Mart, thus reducing the cost of packaging.

Foreseeably in the future, when one decides to purchase a low-power UltraBook, you can get what is effectively a Universal Power Adaptor that will fit the common port on your UltraBook, no matter which PC Maker makes it, be it Dell, Hewlett Packard, Toshiba, Lenovo, etc.

This unification of standards in terms of a Universal Charger Design in the smartphone world, which combats the phenomenon of Vampire “Ghost” or Vampire Power as stated in the article “AT&T to sell eco-friendly phone charger”, published March 17, 2010 1:52 PM PDT by Marguerite Reardon, CNET News - Signal Strength can also be adopted by Intel’s UltraBook standard and thus make UltraBooks even cheaper overall, serious competition to the now US$999 Apple MacBook Air.

Throw in the idea of Integrated Solar Panels, thus cutting the Power Cord once and for all as stated in my blog article entitled “Alternative Energy and Solar Power - Die Another Day” and a Common Standard for Laptop Power Adaptors with nearly unlimited power may not seem such a far-fetched idea.